Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2009, Page 12

Adolf Friðriksson
In the following section, the spatial
organization and relationship between
burial sites and farm settlements in
Iceland will be described. Then, some of
the basic features, such as the quantity
and arrangement of graves inside ceme-
teries, will be examined. As will be dem-
onstrated, the available data reveals dif-
ferent types of cemetery sites. In conclu-
sion, these differences and their meaning
will be discussed and suggestions made
for further work.
Grave fíelds and Communities
At the outset of antiquarian study and
museum work, in 19th century Iceland,
beliefs and explanations regarding pagan
burials fell more or less into two catego-
ries. First, it was generally believed that
the ancients were buried in big mounds,
preferably on mountain tops or other
high places. In these mounds were the
remains of a single chieftain or settler,
but other members of the household were
not accounted for. Second, chance finds
of a burial ground with a number of
graves were explained as battlefrelds,
becoming the resting place of men killed
there during a single event from the
Settlement Age or Saga Age or perhaps
in the Middle Ages. However, during the
fírst half of the 20th century, burial fmds
accrued as a result of intensifícation in
road construction and field cultivation,
and generated a wider spectrum of ancient
burial tradition. In Iceland, some 160
pagan burial sites from the Late Iron Age
have been recorded so far. These remains
can be considered to date to the period c.
AD 800-1100, which roughly coincides
with the historical consensus on the date
of arrival of the fírst Norse (and primarily
pagan) settlers in Iceland (c.AD 870),
and until the conversion from paganism
to Christianity in the early llth century.
Some 700 grave goods have been recov-
ered from these pagan graves, and the
small number of these artefacts, which
are datable with reference to established
Viking age typology, point to the late 9th
and the 10th century AD. Early Icelandic
society was based on a farming economy
supplemented by hunting and físhing.
The remains of 9th-10th century dwellings
and byres and other agricultural struc-
tures have been found both by the coast
and inside fjords and valleys around the
island. Almost all of the tarown burial
sites are found in these lowland, farming
areas, and generally presumed to have
belonged to a nearby farm. In 1974,
Eldjám (1974, 133) wrote: “It appears
that there were no specifíc cemeteries,
intended for many farms or a whole
region. Rather, people were buried near-
by their home farm, in a kind of house-
hold grave fíeld.” New data gathered
during a topographical survey between
1998-2008, where almost all known sites
were mapped, now offers fresh insights
into the distribution of burial sites and its
meaning.
So far, the question of the rise of new
communities during the settlement peri-
od, and their nature has not been addressed
on the basis of archaeological evidence:
A farm, one may infer, was limited to one
or few households, but the creation of a
sense of community of several farms,
their identity and the degree and nature of
social cohesion remains obscure.
In most cases, the chronological rela-
tionship between a single farm site and a
cemetery remains hypothetical, but it
appears to be common that the farm com-
plexes remain in the same location for
centuries, even up to modern times.
Spatial analysis of farms within the cul-
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